Christ to Be Confessed at All Costs

 

You should be ready not only to sell your goods but also to leave father and mother, life and limb, goods and honor. Rather than let go of God, I should disregard wife and child and everything. That is what the martyrs did. Rather than deny their God, husband and wife separated; and husbands strengthened their wives in prison, and wives their husbands. Otherwise they are to remain together. But were it to happen that your wife, child, goods, and honor must be left for Christ's sake, then the call is: Follow Me. Oh, they say, I cannot do that; it is too difficult for me. But one must come to the point of doing it. Nevertheless, when it happens that someone for God's sake leaves whatever he has, it is not done with joy and gladness but with sorrow and trembling. But because Christians are under the cover and shadow of the Lord Jesus Christ, this is not held against them.


Martin Luther
What Luther Says, p. 205
Compiled by Ewald M. Plass